I think you all miss the point. It is not about how he spend the money (in this case an education perceived to be not worth its money by a majority of you) but what he did to save this money. You could spend it on your next start-up or get inspiration to pay off your own debt by changing your living standards.
This business was riding on the wave of Groupon like deal sites.
The start-up was not so much about running a profitable business but about capturing the funding possibilities that came up due to the popularity and profitability of Groupon and its numerous clones.
The Blackberry is a pure communication device. Actually, it is only about communicating. Teenage girls use it, but also my professors. Lately, the technological gap between all the android generics and iphones is increasing, but easily resolvable. Increase the processor speed, the screen resolution and use a better camera. Also they should make the OS smoother.
People do not care as long as they do not have the feeling they are missing something.
Make the BB easy for developers that popular apps are also available for the BB, but this will not gain you any new customers, it will only avoid that you are loosing customers.
Blackberry should focus on the productivity of their customers. I want a phone dead simple but 100% perfect for communicating, 100% secure and 100% trust-able. Blackberry should offer cloud services so that people are locked-in. I use my Blackberry as I used my Nokia, most people do that.
They should leverage their BBM into a social network.
They should upgrade their java, so that android developers can easily develop for BB as well.
They should create an opportunity whereby carriers can earn more money, carriers are loosing ground everywhere. They do not earn money on the whole internet thing on phones nowadays.
Create great utilities, some usable office software.
Offer a cloud service in which you can store every message and any file you ever had on your phone. Comparable with my gmail account. So that i ve a BB archive.
Focus on privacy. There's a huge chance there will be a backslash on privacy in the next 5 years. I do not trust android or iphone phones. With the first a feel too much attached too google with the second I'm Apple's prisoner.
Focus on openness. I would like to connect my BB to any system available. I want to install every program I want to use.
Make it a great calculation device. Do you remember the HP 12c calculator. I should have the same kind of feeling with my BB somehow. Not by replicating the calculators functions, but by somehow making it a swiss knive.
A bitcoin exchange is a shady business, no regulation exists. So it is a freespace for criminals and hackers. You hustle or you will be hustled. This guy should have made a withdrawal by any means. In the bitcoin business only your wallet file counts, the rest is just a big hustle. And please forgot that you're able to sue somebody over a bitcoin dispute.
Article with a foundation in microeconomics. Because of imperfect substitution and joint consumption technologies Lady Gaga and hedge fund managers make more money than investment bankers, who do not enjoy the benefits of joint consumption technologies (every deal is piecework).
Maybe Google wants to buy a highly salesforce, capable of luring small business owners in very risky deals. They definitely could increase the amount of adwords customers as well.
It's wonderful. I cannot wait to use it. Because now you have actual control about your pipe, but still able to use the easy gui. Useful for every quick project.
The author wrote two other articles about what debaters should know about respectively Law and Economics, which will provide you some basic models to help you in your argumentation and your critical thinking about these subjects as a layman. They are on linked on his homepage http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/dgwdebate.html
Could somebody suggest similar articles about other topics? For example statistics.
I really would like to know what kind of 'financial software' it was that Lucky Dave excelled in. It could be MS Excel.
Sorry for not adding anything meaningful to the discussion.
PS: This guy hired a user of his product. Nevertheless, this user was already giving superb support to other users, without any external motivation. So he hired a passionate customer, who already did some parts of the job. So if you want to hire somebody, you should look at your customers and community first. I think that is the lesson.
I disagree with this thread. It's quite unfair to push Max Klein that he will reveal his business niches. His specific business details are unrelated to the quality of his business, which are (still) valuable even without knowing the specifics. Would you like to share your specific niches with the HN-Crowd, full of highly productive programmers?? I cannot ignore the feeling that the purpose of questioning the authenticity of Max Klein and his blog posts is to expose his niches.
A long time ago I turned from effective use of the Internet into a consuming mood. Consuming information. “Enough is enough” doesn't play any role on the Internet. You will never consume enough information and there's always something new to discover. Most of the time the information you read will not add anything to your knowledge, or your productivity. Don't blame the Internet, understand that it is all your fault. If you are a person who likes to procrastinate, prefer to read than to act, you will easily fell in the traps of the Internets. Personally these are my solutions to handle the problem;
If you think something is an interesting read, skim it(or in other words, scan it for useful information), bookmark it for later. And probably you will never spent a lot of time on the article . And if a need for this article pops in your head, you can easily find it back.
Never use on-line documentation for studying or as a reference when doing something productive on the computer. Always download the necessary files (pdfs online) beforehand.
Prepare you for your task, collect the information on line but when starting the task: just switch of the Internet, even better don't have any physical connection with the web.
I love a minimalistic desktop, remove the webbrowsers' icons on your desktop or any menu panel. Just start your browser with a keyboard shortcut. The inviting sweet internet entrances, which you're conditioned to press when you want to avoid a task or need an information kick are gone. Recondition yourself when using the new shortcuts: Think about the purpose you want to use the web and what time you want to spent on that task.
You never spent time a lot of time consuming useful information, because you will directly apply this information to anything productive. With the Internet, you find the stuff you want in a glance. The problem is information you're consuming, the interesting stuff you want to read, all the stuff what's coming in an endless stream.
Don't read any opinionated stuff published on an obscure web blog written by an obscure person without any (productive) accomplishments. Probably you won't miss anything useful.
Just check your favorite websites daily, preferably weekly. Try to optimize the interval between visits. If you follow some interesting people or blogs, which doesn't publish daily, just subscribe to the feed using your email.
Allow yourself time on the Internet to do and read anything you like,after work and just set yourself a time limit. Because overall for me the internet is a great discovery mechanism, which increases my productivity. But do it consciously.
Most of the time I don't use the Internet dominantly when I'm sitting beyond my screen. I always need it for something I want to do.
PS I only use Facebook is an interactive address book, twitter to follow some interesting persons and Gtalk/AOl for colleagues, when working on a project.
Very useful product. This is a service I'm actually going to use. By the way, If you change your name to something more generic, add a couple of other educational sources to you engine as well, you will be google as academic earth is youtube.
Sorry, but what's the point of this blog post? Maybe this article is somewhat more valuable (for a start-up). http://online.wsj.com/article/S60519BORZO.html
"Software tools and online services that ... generate[s] sales leads without the usual legwork and the often-inefficient cold calling. "